Looking for love... in all the right places

It's time to work. It's time to stop worrying about my Stratford audition and work on my pieces. So why am I sitting here, checking and re-checking my email, reading other people's blogs, writing in my journal of procrastination?

I suppose it's fear. Fear of getting down to work. What is so frightening about work? I guess it's my ego. If I start to work, I will start to realize how much more work I have to do, and then I will start to feel like no amount of work will be enough. At least, that's how I feel about work before I start to do it. But when I do it, I have a good time. I love it. It doesn't matter how much there is to do when I'm actually doing it. It's only when I'm putting off the work that it feels overwhelming.

I'm hoping for an email from somebody, anybody, saying "You can do it. You're great!" But nobody even knows what I'm working on, so why would they email me? Nobody knows that I'm feeling insecure and afraid. That I'm auditioning for Stratford for the fourth or fifth time, and that this time feels like "it's now or never." I think, in the past, I auditioned just for the sake of auditioning. I never really believed I had a chance of actually getting accepted. But this time...

I don't know, it's not that I feel any different from before. I still feel the enormous odds against me. But I look back at pieces I've done in the past, and think how woefully underprepared they were. How lack of life experience prevented me from experiencing them fully. And I think, this time I know how to prepare. I acknowledge the imaginary life I have always been in touch with - maybe a little too in touch. As a child, my whole world was imaginary. Everyone real around me became part of my inner life as soon as I was alone. I think I'm only starting to be far enough away from my childhood to realize what a rare gift that imaginary life was. As a teenager and young adult, all I could see was how weird it was. When everybody else grew up watching TV shows and movies and playing video games, I made up stupid scenarios alone in my room, and recorded myself, talking to and voicing all the other characters in my "dramas". Now I think, "HELLO!!?" Is it any wonder I have a drive and talent for acting now? I've been doing it my whole life.

But the fear that crept in there in my adolescence is hard to get past. The belief that an imaginary life is a bad or weird thing, that I should have had more real friends and done more "real people" things like going to movies and Chucky Cheese and Calaway Park, that stays with me now, when what I most need is to embrace that odd past and use it, relive it even. Why did it come so naturally to me then to talk to people that weren't there, to make up scenarios that didn't exist - and why am I so afraid of doing it now? There's no-one listening. I'm alone at home.

But I take it as a good sign that I can even ask myself these questions. The new Flaming Lips album, which I've barely gone a day without listening to since it came out a month and a half ago, has a song that goes, "She's starting to live her life from the inside out. The sound of failure calls her name. She's decided to hear it out." The first lyric is how I feel about the work I'm doing now. The second lyric may sound defeatist to some. But my friend Rebecca whose blog is called "Adventure in Fear and Failure" - she would understand this lyric. Too bad she didn't make it through the whole Lips concert we saw in Toronto. They didn't play that song anyway. And any improvisors, at least the ones trained by Keith Johnstone, will understand that failure is a good thing. It was my failure to get into Stratford in the past that brought me to this point now. What will I make of it? How will I use it to take my next step forward?

The answer to these questions will only revealed when I get off this computer, get on the floor, feel the boards with my bare feet, feel the impulse that swells up inside me, and speak. Oh, and breathe. I always forget that one.

I guess the thing that's daunting about it all, is that, as a kid the imaginary life came easily to me. As I get older, it gets harder and harder to access. And it gets more and more technical, the process I have to go through to find the same state of being that, as a kid, I just inhabited all the time. So the solution is to embrace the technicalities, embrace the work, because it's the only way to stay connected to that feeling of being ten years old and being able to do anything.

What does the title of this post mean? It means when I get up from this computer, I will stop looking for reassurance and sympathy and love from the outside, from friends, from mentors, who are not in my world right now, and over whom I have no control. I will look inside myself to find the thing that will propel me forward into the unknown. That's love.

I will look at the quotation, framed on the wall of my parent's house, that says,

"The love you liberate in your work is the only love you keep."

Ahhh. I feel better.